The Day the Empire Fell

Expanded Edition Vincent Scotti Eiren

Barbary Shore is an imprint of Six Gallery Press PO Box 90145 Pittsburgh, PA 15224 barbary.shore@gmail.com

The Day the Empire Fell: Expanded Edition 2011 by Vincent Scotti Eirene. ISBN: 978-1-926616-36-0

This book would not have been possible if not for the love of my family: Rebecca, Caitlin, and Chenoa.

CONTENTS
7 Foreword: The Art of Peacemaking by Mark Vander Vennen 11 The Day the Empire Fell 13 Mollys Clear Broth Chicken Soup 16 Uncle Joe Goes to the Circus 19 1968: What Thirty-Five Cents Will Buy You 21 I Thought You Had the Handcuffs! 23 On the Road 27 The Children of Edward Abbey 31 The Brains of Auschwitz 38 Olympic Reections 42 Caitlin Is Born 44 Crime and Punishment 46 Italian Toast, Margarine on the Side, Please. 48 The Last Visit to My Father 51 From Pittsburgh to New Orleans 53 Malik Rahim 60 Community and Nonviolent Confrontation 65 Pilgrimage to Los Alamos 71 Photos

77 Night Flight to Baghdad 79 From Vietnam to Iraq 81 The Public Hospital 91 Orientation 93 Reflection on March 20, 2004 95 War Criminal 97 Winking at Fallujah 99 The Psychiatrist 104 Empty Playgrounds 106 The Center of the Storm 107 Photos 111 The Mountains of West Virginia and the Children of Afghanistan 113 The Mountains of West Virginia and the Children of Afghanistan 117 Mike Roselle 123 Afterword

Foreword: The Art of Peacemaking Mark Vander V ennen The Day the Empire Fell is a remarkable book, and I am delighted to commend it to you. Vincent Scotti Eiren is a consummate storyteller. In this book he offers poetic vignettes about his family and his lifelong journey into nonviolent peacemaking. Along the way he takes us across the country, from Pittsburgh to Chicago, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, the White House, New Orleans, Atlanta, and even beyond, to Fallujah and Baghdad. We meet an assortment of colorful characters, people like Grandma Molly, Phillip Berrigan, Hungry Bear, Uncle Joe, Black Panther Malik Rahim, Martin Sheen, judges, lawyers, activists, and others. Stitched together, the stories serve as a striking miniature of our age. They form a snapshot of a time in American history, ashes of what Jack Kerouac did for an earlier era with his book On the Road. Throughout these finely rendered stories, Vincents reflections are tender, and his juxtapositions are startling. For me, all of them come together naturally in one theme: the art of peacemaking. And at least two aspects of that theme stand out.

The first is humor. These vignettes illustrate that humor is at the core of Vincents peacemaking. Humor is not an interesting add-on, nor is it simply an endearing aspect of Vincents personality. On the contrary, humor is an essential tool by which we creatively engage people. It is the door into building respectful and genuine relationships with ones opponents, without which peace is impossible. I know of no one who knows this and practices it better than Vincent. Vincent is to peacemaking what Patch Adams is to medicine. The second theme is nonviolence, and it is this which is the central plea of the book. Violence is nonpartisan. It runs underneath the polarizations of our age, such as the Left and the Right. Vincent uses poignant stories from his own family to show that the confrontation between violence and nonviolence lies within our own hearts. This book serves as a clarion call: perhaps at no time in American history is nonviolent direct action, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, more desperately needed than today. History has done its cruel work of largely sanitizing the legacies of Gandhi and King. Daniel Berrigan has pointed out that while the remnant of the peace movement attempts to assess the damage done to Iraq, it has avoided assessing the damage done to our moral conscience that will allow the next war to occur. Today an ideology of fear and hate has sanctioned, without questioning, unprecedented economic and military violence, done in our names, even in the name of Christianity. But Jesus calls us to love our enemies. Nonviolence introduces an incisive, comprehensive alternative to the logic of self-interest and the cynical, reactive patterns of violence. It throws up a mirror that forces us to confront ourselves. On these pages Vincent tells stories; let me tell two stories

which illustrate that Vincent walks what he talks. In the early 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, Vincent and I participated in Christian Peacemakers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Christian Peacemakers undertook nonviolent civil disobedience at the U.S. Steel Building in Downtown Pittsburgh, then headquarters of Rockwell International, the third largest military contractor in the United States. At one such witness, a police officer dragged Vincent away by his hair. Though in obvious pain, Vincent responded beautifully, in accordance with our training in nonviolence: he did not resist. An anti-war bystander, a selfdescribed Leftist, ran up to the scene and yelled, Hey listen, hes a human being, you [expletive] pig! Later, when Vincent told this story to his close friend Phillip Berrigan, I remember Phil laughing, laughing and laughing some more, his laughter deep and free. In the 1990s Vincent was falsely accused of assaulting a police officer at a demonstration. The reverse had actually happened: a number of policemen had viciously assaulted Vincent. A crucial character witness in Vincents defense was the retired Head of Security at the U.S. Steel Building. Vincent had developed such a mutually respectful and genuine relationship with him over the years that the Security Head was delighted to testify on Vinces behalf (as were Phil Berrigan and actor Martin Sheen). The testimony of the police was such that at various points during the trial the spectators, jury and judge broke out into laughter. The jury rightly declared Vincent innocent of the trumped-up charges. Finally, a word of advice: never let Vincent leave a restaurant ahead of you. At the door, he will turn and address the entire restaurant with an enthusiastic Good night, everybody! In the time that it takes the patrons to turn toward the door,

Vincent will have left, leaving you to face the crowd. In a manner not unlike that scene, this book sets up a confrontation. Like nonviolence itself, it throws up a mirror. I invite you to look steadily into it and ask whether its reections give a more accurate picture of ourselves and of contemporary America than the narratives given by pundits and academics, stories emanating from the false polarizations of Right and Left. I am convinced that out of this difficult but courageous personal confrontation with violence, comes peace. Mark Vander Vennen is the co-author of Hope in Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises (2007).

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The Day the Empire Fell

Mollys Clear Broth Chicken Soup Molly married my grandfather in a small town outside of Naples, Italy when she was a teenager. She was brought to America one year later pregnant, with no knowledge of English or the American way of life. She lived in the United States until she was seventy-nine years old. She died only knowing a small handful of English phrases and never having learned how to drive. She had a tremendous fear of outliving her husband. She knew nothing of the world outside of her Italian neighborhood; her grocer and butcher both spoke Italian. Yet this humble woman raised and cared for her husband, four sons and two daughters. For my grandmother, whom we called Molly, it was time to be strategic if her family would be fed. It was after World War II and food and other items were rationed so that the government could feed the armed forces. To obtain these basic needs, ration stamps were issued according to the size of your family. Taking advantage of this small opportunity, Molly applied to run a small produce store out of her garage. Back then the feds allowed a fifteen percent spoilage rate. Even when there was not fifteen percent spoilage, she would take it. At the end of each day she would close her makeshift store and allow other mothers with large families to come into the garage. She would lock the door and they would divide the spoils of war.

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Even before I was born, my father placed boxing gloves over my bedroom door. When I was four or five, he started to throw balls at me. I had no idea what he was doing. He never realized that I was a southpaw, and kept trying to make me play ball as if I were right-handed. For all I know, if Id played right, I may have become the next Mickey Mantle. This was not meant to be. Upon realizing I would never be a boxer or basketball player like him, he would go into violent rages and beat me. Knowing that there was no way to meet this problem head on, Molly asked if she could babysit me every Saturday. I loved our Saturdays together. Molly took me shopping in Market Square, a small shopping district in the heart of Downtown Pittsburgh. We would shop for fresh meat, produce, bread and other staples. Upon arriving home she would cook, and cook, and cook. She would dramatically hold up a green pepper and say to me, Oh VJ, this pepper is a work of art! How can I bring myself to cut this up? I was so skinny that she would try to feed me for eight hours each Saturday. She would put honey in a double boiler and throw in tufts of pastry dough, then pour out the cooked nuggets and honey onto the cutting board. She would explain, saying, Look VJ, this is struvoli. When I finally escaped my embattled home life and went to school at Ohio State University, I missed Molly the most. I would call her each Saturday, and her voice was soothing in such violent times. In the spring of 1970, all it took was twenty-eight seconds of gunfire four dead and ten wounded to sound the end of hope and of the sixties at Kent State. The campuses went up in ames, and over two hundred fifty schools were closed.

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It would take another five years until the war was slowed down to the point that the US lost. In April 1975, the worlds mightiest military was pushed out of a country the size of New Jersey. Over 3.2 million Vietnamese had died in this undeclared war. For Molly it was another war that ended her life. Her sons had formed a construction company, V. Scotti and Sons. The newfound wealth of this first-generation Italian-American family tore it limb from limb. There were divorces and accusations of theft. The attempt to pass the concrete construction business to the grandsons failed. They say Molly had a soft heart and that is why she died in 1973, but I knew differently. It was the obscenity of her sons fighting over money. It broke her heart. Months before she died, I called her and asked her to share an old family secret. Molly, I asked, how did you make your chicken soup broth clear? She answered, Well VJ, let me tell you: I strain the broth through asbestos cheesecloth. Well, I thought, we cant all be perfect.

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Uncle Joe Goes to the Circus Light years before the Pentagon was levitated, or Timothy Leary was kicked out of Harvard for proclaiming far and wide the benefits of LSD, or the armies of the night thrust flowers into the barrels of M-16s at the Pentagon, or the Black Panthers initiated their breakfast program; way before Abbie Hoffman ordered us to shoot our parents or the Pieman took aim at the homo-terrified orange juice queen Anita Bryant; before the Yippies hatched the idea to throw dollars onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange or Vietnam veterans threw their Purple Hearts onto the steps of Congress; before Martin Luther King went to Memphis, Uncle Joe took us to the circus. It was 1958 and after much booming, millions of postwar babies were let loose into the world. Here in the USA, in Pittsburgh, the Scottis were doing their part; they had conceived thirty-three first cousins (including the Navarros, Della Gattis, Zaccharos and the Della Vecchias) into this blossoming ItalianAmerican family.

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With great expectation we sat in darkness on dirty bleachers, with an offensive acidic smell in the air. From the sky came a single beam of light that landed on a little man with a big manual megaphone to announce the nights activities. Women and men flew through the air, human cannonballs crossed the sky, elephants moved to their knees and gave out an otherworldly bellow, tigers leapt through flaming hoops. A little car screamed across the big top floor and crashed into a pole and out of the cracked shell of the car emerged a thousand clowns. When my father Adolfo returned from World War II, he and his father Vincenzo were asked if they could pour cement sidewalks. They were amused by the question and answered in the affirmative. Then father and son were asked if they could construct all of the sidewalks in Mt. Lebanon Township. What had been an unobtainable treasure could now be gained by crisscrossing a sea of suburban green lawns with concrete paths. That is when the trouble began. As the iced Cokes and pillows of cotton candy were passed down the row to legions of squealing boomers, my father bent way down and whispered in my ear, Look at Uncle Joe. I looked over: his body shaking with laughter, he was imitating one of the clowns. He had a fistful of dollar bills, which he passed out to us... See Uncle Joe, my father said. He will never amount to anything. Do not be like Uncle Joe! Save your money and make something of yourself! Epochs before the John and Yoko bed-in for peace I realized who I was to be like, that I must run away and join the circus and that I must never ever save my money. For Uncle Joe showed me that money is only valuable when given away.

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Uncle Joe died in 1984, outside the favor of his nuclear family. At the time of his death, he was volunteering his time teaching concrete construction to convicts at Pennsylvanias Western Penitentiary.

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1968: What Thirty-Five Cents Will Buy You I reached into my pocket and pulled out thirty-five cents. I had a decision to make: should I buy a pack of Larks? Buy lunch? Skip school and take a trolley Downtown? As I climbed aboard the South Hills/Drake Line trolley the driver looked upon me with suspicion. Why was I not in school? Weeks before, as we were sitting in class, we watched curiously out the window as local police arrested some college students for trespassing on school property. We rushed to the edge of campus to meet these intruders, college students, antiwar activists, and were met with people just a few years older than we were. They were dressed in army trench coats, with patches that seemed to mock the military garb. They told us of a demonstration against the war, calling for a ceasefire, a moratorium. Behind the eyes of these Pitt students was a wild desperation. I promised myself I would go. As I left the trolley for Downtown I was confronted with tens of thousands of suits, dresses and construction helmets. Soon I found out that a moratorium against the war meant folk took the day off of work to demand an end to the killing. There was not a hippie in the crowd.

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This was Pittsburgh and people, normal people, were angry. Enough people had died. Enough had been killed. The buttons of that day screamed: Out Now!

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I Thought You Had the Handcuffs! With Phillip Berrigan we planned various acts of civil disobedience. The beauty of this type of witness is that it pulls the opponents into a drama that they would otherwise have no interest in. This was an effective and faithful way to break up the false consensus that surrounded the building of five nuclear weapons a day, the American contribution to the nuclear arms race. As Phil spoke, we dutifully filled the keyholes of a half dozen handcuffs with hot wax, making it virtually impossible for the police to unlock them. Trying to appear normal as we entered the White House tour provided the days only comic relief. No matter how you dressed up these nuclear resisters, we just did not fit in. We tucked our hair up under our hats, put on sports coats and dresses and blended in. On cue, we made a break with the tour and sped across the White House lawn for our goal post, the White House fence. This was not part of the plan. The previous week a man had been killed by the Secret Service for running toward the White House swinging a pipe.

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Federal marshals were chasing us across the lawn and warned us that we should halt or they would shoot. We ran forward even faster, as if we could outrun even a speeding bullet. Upon reaching the White House fence, we stood there in disbelief that our support people were nowhere in sight. Phil, upon hearing we were running across the lawn, pushed people out of the way to see if we were alive. Finally, someone appeared and threw the handcuffs over the fence. They fell a bit short of their mark, landing at the feet of the police. The police smiled and assumed the jig was up. But somewhere deep inside of us, the anger of being reminded of our mortality, and of our future being taken from us, gave us the strength of survival and, possessed by Gods will to preserve, we wrestled the police to the ground and tore the cuffs from their hands. We snapped the handcuffs shut around the White House fence. Unknown to us, Jimmy Carter and concerned Congress people were watching this entire fiasco. They were in the middle of a secret meeting, plotting the demise of this unpopular weapon. The international media moved in, shoving for a good shot of the unwanted White House guests. Several hundred miles away, Adolf Scotti, my father, had sat down to his traditional Sunday spaghetti dinner. As the spaghetti sauce dripped onto his freshly-pressed, starched white shirt, the TV screen at the end of the table filled up with his sons face and long curls. He sat there in disbelief as I shouted: Just as these chains are being cut, so we must free ourselves from the chains that bind us to this nuclear madness! My father swung toward the TV and spat out, And for this I sent him to Ohio State?

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On the Road In the Hebrew Scriptures much is written about Sabbath, meaning rest of God. Believers in antiquity were even instructed to allow their fields to lie fallow so they could be naturally replenished. So, too, with the human heart, one can only witness so much suffering before one become unresponsive. After a fourth person in my neighborhood of Manchester on Pittsburghs North Side died from gang violence, those who support my hospice for the homeless insisted that I take a sabbatical. With much trepidation I handed the sanctuary for the homeless over to another community. I reduced my possessions to three boxes, including my pastel art, videos of various peace actions, my scrapbooks and manuscripts. A bit unnerved, I released them to a friend, who periodically assured me that they were safe under her bed. I bought a three hundred-dollar Dodge Aries, met a young hipster named Blackwater to share expenses, and headed to points unknown. The first stop was Chicago, where I visited a friend, a radical feminist visual artist. We made it just in time for her art opening. Once there I was overcome with this sinking feeling in my stomach that my time on the road was a mistake.

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I was surrounded by the most arrogant people, dipping their strawberries in fresh whipped cream. Facing the gang wars in Pittsburgh seemed more advantageous. Our next stop: Boulder, Colorado. Here we stayed with some Gothic Death Rockers. These pale bohemians would have even tested the patience of Manny Theiner, Pittsburghs best known music/culture revolutionary. How many times can one listen to Bela Lugosis Dead? Walls were painted black, and a cage was filled with screeching exotic parrots, unnervingly imitating the high-pitched shrill of a smoke detector. Soon the Zombie Tribe assembled for some homegrown entertainment. As Lurch played the hurdy-gurdy out came a rendition of belly dancing only to be matched by Laurel and Hardy. Now I was absolutely convinced that I had made a big mistake leaving my home town. Yet Blackwater convinced me to push on to the West Coast. If one is to survive economically on the road food is a big issue, so preached my back-to-the-Earth guru and co-pilot. I was, literally, spoon-fed millet day and night. Millet is a lot like the manna that fell from Heaven and caused the Israelites to go insane, to turn their backs on God and engage in less-thankosher feasts. Millet, millet, millet... millet cereal with honey, millet patties, millet stew with onions and spices. I am a vegan, but I could see the pagan fires in the distant night, beckoning me to infidelity. No road movie is complete without an encounter with the enemy of the road, the state police. Just outside of Denver we were stopped by a policeman who had a remarkable resemblance to one of the corrections officers in Cool Hand Luke. My mind raced, my heart pounded.

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At the time, there was an active warrant out for my failing to appear at a trial for blocking the doors at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Software Engineering Institute (SEI) last August 6th, Hiroshima Day. Would the computer reveal my fugitive status? But running my plate would have followed linear thinking, and this situation would not yield to that. In an unprecedented move the cop asked me to come back to his car. He asked, Where are you going? His knuckles had turned white from the the crushing grip on his gun handle. I would not answer. Then he spat out, Why did you leave Pittsburgh? I obtained a glimpse of what Kennedy and Khrushchev must have felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis, face-to-face, staring eyes painfully dry. So I blinked and mischievously told him the truth. I told him about my need for time off, this fall and winter national speaking tour, about the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I told him of my plans to cross the fence at Los Alamos National Labs in January 1995. The state policeman ever so slowly removed his sunglasses to reveal a fresh black eye. As if speaking to an annoying dog, he simply exclaimed, Geeeet out! Twenty-six hundred miles and thirteen tanks of gas later, we arrived on the West Coast. Out of the car I stepped into Eugene, Oregons festive Saturday farmers market. There, my eyes met a large, hairy man with dreads. His eyes revealed a young man Id not seen since the raging peace marches in 1991

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against the first US war in Iraq. We laughed at this serendipitous path-crossing. He was now Hungry Bear, a hemp advocate. He sat me down and told me of the West Coast criminalization of the homeless and harassment of colorful people. He led me to various people who are fighting against this injustice. So I traveled to San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and San Diego. I zig-zagged up and down the coast in disbelief of the dark side of paradise, all the victims of Americas last cottage industry: tourism. The unsightly were arrested for sitting or sleeping in public. Riot police were arresting people for running a restaurant without a license (feeding the homeless). Monthly sweeps of the city in which anyone not fitting into the social landscape was arrested. This was an ugly side of America, unseen in the conservative East. Contrasted with the West Coasts response to the homeless, Pittsburgh seemed like the city you should wear flowers in your hair when visiting. The previous winter, members of Pittsburghs police force, homeless advocates, and the media searched the streets, saving the lives of our citys less fortunate members by finding people under bridges, in parking lots, and in alleys, taking them indoors before a life-threatening blizzard hit. While in Eugene, Oregon, some environmental warriors invited me to drive nine hundred miles to a march against logging in central Idaho. The logging industry was clearcutting hundreds of acres of our last and largest wilderness areas, and I wanted to see this firsthand. They warned me of the danger involved in a proposed march through logging country, and then we dumpster-dove for a load of not-so-perfect peaches. My next stop was Dixie, Idaho, to join Earth First!

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The Children of Edward Abbey Edward Abbey was a genuine American iconoclast. Born in 1927 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, he has been called the Thoreau of the American West for his book Desert Solitaire (1968). He liked to bait environmentalists, shooting guns into the air and tossing the empty beer cans out of his truck as he barreled down Americas highways. What the hell? he asked me once, before his death in 1989. The highways are much worse than the litter. His best-known book The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) was a sendup of all the aspects of the environmental movement, and it was an early inspiration for Earth First! In 1994 I left my shelter for the homeless, Duncan and Porter House, to see the United States. I had been living in Manchester, on Pittsburghs North Side, for a number of years, and I needed a sabbatical. All the people killing each other in my neighborhood, the Crips and the Bloods and the drug deals gone bad, were beginning to take their toll. I went on the road for almost two years, ending with my imprisonment for crossing the line at Los Alamos in 1995, fifty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In doing so, I would face the Guns of Navarone, the M-16s there, and I wanted to make sure that I saw some of the world before I was possibly killed.

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I traveled from Pittsburgh to Denver, from Denver to Eugene, from Eugene to Seattle, and finally back to Eugene to live for a while with Hungry Bear, a hemp cook and farmer, and an advocate for medical marijuana. When the time came for me to leave Eugene, I met a woman who asked me to drive with her to Dixie, Idaho, where Earth First! was fighting the Cove/ Mallard timber sales. I said, Well, isnt Dixie, Idaho a long way from here? No, she said, its not that far. And it turned out to be some nine hundred miles. The philosophy of Earth First! was very different from my own. On one hand, these folk were picking up where we left off in the sixties and seventies, after decades of violence inflicted upon the Earth. On the other hand, they seemed to be reacting to the activism of the sixties and to their parents nonviolence. And a lot of them were acting very macho, and talking like thugs, and they were talking about acts of destruction, getting guns for the revolution, and blowing up dams and burning up condos and trashing SUVs, and it was all very offensive to me. From Dixie, we hiked seventy-five miles into central Idaho. When we reached the forest that was earmarked for destruction, I could see that the anger of my friends was more than justified. We lived outside and we ate outside in an extremely hostile environment. Like the civil rights movement in the sixties, the people living in this area couldnt hide their contempt for us. We had to travel sixty miles for gasoline, forty miles for supplies, and as environmentalists we faced hostility everywhere we went. Some of us had been shot at, people had been injured doing this. And where the lumber companies did the clearcutting, it looked like the moon there were no trees at all, and black flies everywhere, biting us. This is what the

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companies wanted to do to the entire region. William Stringfellow, an Episcopal theologian, once said that in the future and, of course, that means now every relationship, whether between nations and states, between one another, or even with ourselves, would be marked by violence. The destruction of another country through war, and the destruction of the environment, the trees, which allow us to breathe, all of this is being done just so people can make money. This destruction seems to be employed in every aspect of our lives. So I felt that the sabotage, the monkey-wrenching that was happening, was wrong. I felt, and I still feel, that our action, and our activism, must come from a place of love and respect, like Gandhi driving the British out of India. This led to some very long late-night discussions. And Gandhi, too, used to get in trouble for this. He would stay up late at night, talking to the violent anarchists. He enjoyed their company, and he felt that their anger and passion were more in line with his desire to see change than the passivity of his religious friends. It took us about twelve days to reach our destination. When we arrived, almost immediately we received word that we had won, that this lumber company would be pulling out of the forest. As we hiked, a lot of attention had come our way: there were articles in the New York Times, the lumber companies that wanted to buy the lumber were being sued, and those who wished to clearcut this forest couldnt handle the controversy. That is the beauty of this type of action: it draws the other side into a game that they are incapable of playing. Here I was in the forest with these people who had been talking about the acts of sabotage that they had been not committing for years, and we were employing the nonviolent method of an open-air march.

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And we won.

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The Brains of Auschwitz In 1987, Vincent was interviewed by Claire P. Rivlin for The Student Union. How long have you been an activist? I have been engaging in some form of activism since I was sixteen, in 1968, the Vietnam era. For the last thirteen years I have attempted to speak some truth to the powers about the nuclear arms race, and I have been in and out of prison, believing its only by transgressing the law that we can get to the heart of the injustice. What do you know about Carnegie Mellon Universitys Software Engineering Institute? How would you characterize it? SEI is not some computer engineering firm. It is central to enhancing every aspect of military software and is central to the Department of Defense. SEI is the brains of Auschwitz.

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What do you mean, the brains of Auschwitz? What I mean is that there were a lot of people involved with the genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany who felt they were not responsible for the hideous crimes because they were not directly involved in the actual murders of innocent people. But in fact everyone was guilty, from citizens all the way up to those who turned the valves releasing the gas and those who fired the ovens. Nuclear holocaust is even worse because it is not simply racial genocide, but the killing of every living thing. So whether we pay our federal taxes that enable our country to make five nuclear weapons a day or work at SEI or Pittsburghs Rockwell International (the third largest military contractor in the United States), we all stand before history as premeditated murderers. What about the SEI statements that they are a software research organization, simply doing research to discover information which could lead to anything? Almost all of its funding comes from the Department of Defense. Now if they arent doing anything for the DoD, why are they being funded? Well, they say the National Science Foundation is unable to fund them. I dont want a society organized like that. I dont want the DoD enhancing software for a trauma center at a hospital as they said theyre doing. Thats the job of Health and Human Services, the old HEW Health, Education, and Welfare.

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Youre not going to tell me that the military, the DoD and all the military brass, are running in and out of SEI, that there is no type of military value. Thats not doublespeak, it is beyond doublespeak. It is a lie. So whats the solution, to burn down the building to stop it from functioning? The answer, I believe, is a very thoughtful, very loving and systematic nonviolent disruption of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and SEI. I still believe that my ideas are not obtuse. Now heres a problem. We are not Gandhis Indians, we are not Martin Luther Kings blacks, we are not the early union people, we are not even the protesters of the Vietnam War. But the mere survival of humanity depends on the white educated middle class throwing off its selfishness, because in reality we have no aggressor. We are not an occupied country, we are not being racially discriminated against, we are not being shut out of the workplace; so its dependent on us. Thats why some type of miracle has to happen. We have to act on something beyond self-interest. Do you feel that your attention-getting methods, such as your vigils, have gotten through to the CMU administration and/or SEI? I have talked to people that work at SEI, to professors and faculty, administrators and students, and I feel that slowly but surely, by developing relationships with people here, that it will be a combination of the general populace and the CMU community that is going to bring about the disarmament of

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CMU. We just have to do whats right because its right, not because it works. Now you were fined for dumping 100 pounds of ashes on the steps of SEI... If we could go back a bit, its been since September first of last year that as a community we have focused on SEI. And so, when we came to campus a year ago, to leaflet, the police told us that we would face arrest for trespassing on private property. When I told them that we would stop leafleting, they proceeded in asking me for ID. When I refused ID, they said they were going to arrest me. And did they? No. I produced some ID and was escorted off campus. Since then, the campus policy has changed. So, a year ago I came here and leafleted every week, up until December 11th, which was the grand opening of SEI: I knelt down in front of the oncoming traffic that was going into the parking lot of SEI, to pray for peace, and was dragged around several times and then finally arrested for obstructing traffic. I spent ten days in jail for that. The third act of civil disobedience was in remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, once again vigiling on the steps of SEI, sleeping there overnight, trying to be thoughtful and mindful of the future that has now become possible. On August 9th, we dumped a hundred pounds of ashes on the front steps of SEI in order to symbolize what people were turned into at Nagasaki. Now the symbolic aspect of it is very important. A symbolic

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action is a lot like sign language if somebody cant hear you, then it would be a disservice to speak to them as I am speaking to you now. So you speak in sign language to a society that doesnt hear, to a society that is deaf. I think that its a disservice to concentrate on the normal methods of raising consciousness, because raised consciousness is not a changed heart, it is not a changed life. Somebody could be aware of an injustice, but that has nothing to do with interdicting that injustice, with engaging the darkness. But if we go back to the dumping of the ashes, I think it was a sign pointing toward a deeper truth. I think we have forgotten how to think, how to speak. Have a lot of CMU students been supportive of what youre trying to do? I find people this year to be a lot more responsive than I have ever found people, and that gives me a lot of hope. It doesnt mean that somehow theres going to be some type of massive nonviolent confrontation against this injustice. But at least the openness and the curiosity and the willingness is there. So what I did was I had a sign which said SEI WAR and I leafleted and found the students to be very, very responsive, asking when the next demonstration would be, and I was really caught off guard. This new openness gives us a better chance to speak to the travesty of a university like CMU engaging in such destructive activities as opposed to creative ones. What about the argument, Well, somebodys got to do it? Yeah, someone has to destroy humanity. Thats just sick. If were ever going to have love counter this hate then weve got

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to speak some type of truth. People are telling me about M&Ms and the moon and Johnny Carson, and the reality of the matter is that were twenty minutes away from our own extinction and that we have to find a moral equivalent to nuclear war. And hopefully that will be found through some nonviolent battle to purge the evil from our society that has allowed our culture not to even care about the extinction of its own species. Even animals protect their young and we are one step below that. We have not even given the children of society the basic security and right to have a future. Anything else? I think this year will be a significant year in terms of expressing our hearts against the darkness, those representing SEI. I am hopelessly enthusiastic. In a broader sense, what can people do about this darkness? I think that in the time we live in, people should make time. And I think that they should make time for the care of present victims of war, for the poor and oppressed, the homeless and the physically and mentally disabled. That we should spend our time serving and loving these people, and being their friends and developing non-paternalistic answers so that the poor are not the victims of our concern. And that people should somehow creatively and contemplatively confront the nuclear arms race, live simply in community, that we should share the majority of our money, time, and energy with those who have none. We need to move to the margins of society if there is ever to be any world for those who have not chosen the destruction

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of our society, if the children are ever to have a future. We need to take this very, very seriously and yet not hold onto it so much that we choke the truth out of it. We need to leave a legacy for the future generations that some people were not afraid.

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Olympic Reections It was late and my article about my trip to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta was not happening. Then the news broke about an act of domestic terrorism, a pipe bomb exploding during a free concert with Daddy Mac and the Heart Attacks. Violence is so gray. Anonymous violence is insidious, no preparation can absolutely prevent it. There is no defense. No marching army can defeat terrorism. Like the first Gulf War news reports, the more we are told about the terror at the Olympics, the less we know. If only the late-breaking news response to this act of terror was applied to the displacement of the poor of Atlanta. Over fifteen thousand poor people were forcibly removed to make way for the Olympic Games. To the disenfranchised people of Atlanta, the Olympic chaos was like the aftermath of a war. Never would the light of TV cameras illuminate this Olympic defeat. As a response, Food Not Bombs held its Third International Gathering during the Games to unmask them for what they really were, corporate greed at the expense of

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the poor of the city. Food Not Bombs has grown to over one hundred thirty autonomous chapters throughout the world since its inception in Boston in 1990. This anarchistic collective was formed in direct response to the US war in Iraq. Food Not Bombs employs public feedings of the homeless as public commentary on the neglectful violence of poverty and the waste of military spending. Olympic security forces being housed at Morehouse College (ironically, the alma mater of Martin Luther King) have already demonstrated their professional readiness by arresting seventy-four members of the Morehouse College community the week before the Olympic Games started. With the added urgency of this news, I planned my Greyhound bus trip down South. There is no fear like the venture into the South for a Northern activist. The accents are unnerving. The journey conjures up images of Bull Connors unleashing dogs and hoses on civil rights protesters in the sixties. The closer I got to Atlanta the more my anxiety deepened. I kept seeing scenes from Deliverance in my mind. I was weary, tired from recent construction work and the mental exhaustion that comes from living communally with our homeless men. These men are elderly, mentally sick, with one lovely, determined man dying of AIDS. I slept all the way to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Leaving Duncan and Porter Hospitality House for the Homeless made me feel a bit like a representative of some obscure banana republic. Six to nine million homeless are a small nation within America a nation without a homeland, without a flag to burn, without borders to violate, no history, forgotten, forever wandering. Its citizens remain uninvited to the Games of established nations.

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Finally, my nineteen-hour journey was over and I found myself asking a security guard, dressed in an unmistakably brand-new uniform, directions to the citys capitol building. For a moment after the directions were politely given there was a blank, hostile, lingering stare. He and others were alerted to the impending protest. It was nine blocks to the capitol building, a brisk walk, welcome after sitting for so long. As I approached the capitol I came upon a gathering crowd, a mix of dirty punk rockers, Food Not Bombs people and old African-American civil rights activists. This desperate remnant watched as famed civil rights activist Hosea Williams put an Olympic-style torch to the Georgia state ag. The state ag has included elements of the Confederate ag in its design since 1956 in defiance of a courtordered integration. Through a bullhorn, this elder statesman/activist shouted, We are not burning the Georgia state ag, but this enslaving Confederate symbol. The nylon ag did not burn, but sort of shriveled. I suggested that the next time they did this it would help to apply a thin layer of sterno. The Georgia state trooper standing by nervously laughed. This was the first day of the Centennial Olympic Games. I must admit that I am not comfortable with protests that include burning: book burnings, cross burnings. These seem to better reect the intolerant hate of our opponents. It is now Sunday, July 28th. I just called down to Atlanta. Food Not Bombs is on their way to the center of the city, an area called Five Points, to feed the homeless another vegan meal. Part of their nonviolence is to not use any animal products in their meals, another expression of compassion for

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all living creatures. People are anticipating arrests for feeding in Downtown Atlanta, because of new security measures since the terrorist bombing at the Olympics Saturday. I saw a report in which Atlanta officials are claiming that this year five times as much money was spent on the homeless as in previous years. Of course, the City Fathers of Atlanta fail to tell the world that Urban Redevelopment money intended for urban renewal (read: removal) was used to tear down a shelter and several businesses, to relocate people from housing projects and to build Olympic housing. This new housing will be used after the Games to attract productive city-dwellers. These model citizens will be able to move into the temporary Olympic shelters (now glorified efficiencies) for a mere eighty-five thousand dollars. Since the explosion there have been 125 bomb scares due to copycat psychos and fearful visitors frightened by unidentified packages. Today, security forces at the White House were called to investigate a suspicious package. They cleared the area only to discover a little childs discarded lunch. It seems that all we have holding us together in America is our fear of each other.

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Caitlin Is Born On June 4, 1998 at 6:49 PM my wife Rebecca gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Caitlin Greer Scotti Eiren was born seven pounds, nine ounces. After nine months Rebecca went into labor. We called the midwife center and informed them of our imminent arrival. Bored with timing contractions, we took a long ride in our 1979 Ford Ranger pickup truck; this rough ride caused Rebeccas water to break. Finally, this eyesore of a work truck had earned its keep! Rebecca was already packed, and I put a few pairs of underwear, socks, and t-shirts into a blue Giant Eagle bag and soon we were at the urban zoo hospital. We had chosen the contemporary room at the midwife center, complete with an adult-size swimming pool/bath tub. Joseph and Mary never had it so good. As Rebecca employed every method of encouraging birth, I dove into a thousand-page biography about Che, the revolutionary from the sixties. As Rebecca paced the halls and listened to the comforting words of the midwives, Che was

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landing in Cuba with Fidel, accompanied by a handful of ragtag revolutionaries, fighting Batista. As we breathed through contractions, the US-backed regime fell. As many attempts were made to bring this pregnancy to term, Dr. Guevara was making his historic motorcycle ride through the mountains of Bolivia. But alas, the best efforts seemed to only prolong the birth pangs. We held on to each other, waiting for sleep that would never come, as Che fought with Fidel and his brother Raoul, and the revolution came to reflect the very system they had fought so hard to dismantle. As the doctor dug his heel in and pulled her out with forceps, our first daughter made her appearance. The doctor commented on how alert she was, hence her middle name, Greer a Celtic name derived from the Greek word for alert.

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Crime and Punishment I have sat down to write this several times, but given the atmosphere of hostility and apathy it seemed pointless. After the brutal murder of 11-year-old Scott Drake by Joseph Cornelius, a homeless Pittsburgh man, I even found myself cringing upon seeing the homeless. It was the news that Pittsburghs Mayor Tom Murphy created a commission in response to this inexcusable murder that shook me from my fears. This was the same mayor who attempted to have a high school youth group arrested for enabling the homeless by feeding them on a cold winter Sunday morning and distributing blankets Downtown. He went on record as stating, Let the homeless go to Mount Lebanon if they want cared for. Five years later, the same mayor approved the arrest of Food Not Bombs members for distributing food in Market Square. Tom Murphy has created and encouraged this hostility toward the homeless and those who would provide aid and comfort. Neglect is violence. In Pittsburgh we have the fourth poorest African-American community in the country. It is not a harsh judgment to say that this has not been mentioned from many, if any, pulpits. The homeless have fallen out of favor with the general

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public. This issue no longer inspires people to action. People mistake panhandlers for the homeless. After four years of being panhandled on Forbes Avenue, students of the University of Pittsburgh are drained of compassion. Neglect moves to hostility as Scott Drakes parents petition the public to clear the streets of Pittsburghs North Side of the unsightly forgotten. Members of the media asked me to be silent for fear that our homemade sanctuary for the homeless would be shut down or worse. The moment has passed. Joseph and Scott have fallen from the front page and therefore from the short-term consciousness of Pittsburghers. It is no longer news. So here is what I would have said if the media had called: This tragedy is but a dress rehearsal. You cannot cut millions off of welfare and say it has had no effect; such a statement shows the company you keep. We must open our homes to the sick, the destitute, the criminal. If we do not extend this hand of justice the forgotten will visit us and it will not be to thank us. I do not side with Joseph Cornelius, who will surely face capital punishment for his crime. My heart is with the parents of Scott Drake. If retaliation would bring back his son I would be the first to strike a blow. But revenge will not give the peace the Drakes so desperately seek. After twenty-three years of caring for the homeless, I have never felt more determined to bring the hidden to light. Let us pray to God to show us a way out of this endless spiral of crime and punishment.

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Italian Toast, Margarine on the Side, Please. When I need to think, I go to a little diner that my brother Victor and I used to visit. As a rule, we would go out no earlier than four in the morning. In August 2003, he took his own life. As I make my way there after some late-night shopping, I stop to get a Post-Gazette. The man at the 7-Eleven informs me that even though it is 3:00 AM, Mondays paper has not yet hit the stand. I must have ashed a great sense of disappointment because he proceeded to give me Sundays paper for free. People are always giving me stuff. As I settle into the diner for Italian toast and coffee, I am offended by the spin on the war and the cartoon-like announcement that Billy Grahams son is going into Iraq with all his resources to help rebuild the country. It was reported that more Iraqis have died during the aftermath of this so-called liberation than during the war itself. There is no clean water, no electricity, and hospitals have been destroyed. Where four religions claim that civilization started, along the Tigris and Euphrates, the scene looks like St. Johns vision of the end of the world.

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The Marines have been informed their stay in Iraq is indefinite. Finally my Italian toast arrives; it smells like the freshlybaked loaf of Italian bread grandma Molly used to make. I raise my tired eyes to the waitress. Something startles her, and she takes a step back. After regaining her equilibrium she says, Youre Victors brother. Then she stops herself, pauses and disinterestedly asks if I want more coffee. It seems that folk dont want the responsibility of remembering. And the war goes on...

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The Last Visit to My Father My family told me not to come but my intuition whispered, Go now. In the hospital room, I slipped my hand down to his and grasped it. I stroked his gray hair. He winced in pain, but he was relieved I was there. After having half his cancerous vocal cords removed, he looked strong. Except for the twenty-fouryear difference in age, we could have been twins. Even before I was born, my father put boxing gloves above my bedroom door. When I was young, my first memory of him was seeing him laugh. As children we all loved to laugh. I also remembered how my father would throw all these balls at me. I was too small to understand and would usually fall backwards trying to catch them. As the years went by, Dad could not believe the only thing I threw was a frisbee. When I was eleven I was told it was time to go to work. I would work construction every Saturday and summers until I was twenty-two.

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We had a large extended family, with thirty-two first cousins on one side. We were the baby boomers. My father would come home from work, shower, eat dinner and go off to build us a house, on land purchased from some farmer. When we finally moved in, the neighbors were horrified that these wild Italians had arrived in this quiet suburban neighborhood. The green lawns were filled with children. After playing one day I came home and I told my mom and dad some guys roughed me up and said I worshiped Mary. My parents stood silent, then after a moment they quietly started to cry. They had hoped that Upper St. Clair would save me from such base prejudice. One night as we watched our black and white TV, a bare-chested man with long bushy hair came on with war paint and a big rifle and screamed, Shoot your parents! My dad said, Dont you get any ideas, and we laughed for a long time at our first encounter with Abbie Hoffman. My father would become angry as we watched children being knocked to the ground while protesting segregation in Birmingham. He would sit silent as scenes of the war poured into our living room, as we ate off our TV trays. To my surprise he was enthusiastic when I told him I was applying for conscientious objector status with the Selective Service. I had wrongfully assumed he supported the war. Once during college I asked my dad if he could help get me some wheels so I could get around at college. He said yes, and shipped me a one-speed bike. I would come home from Ohio State for the holidays and he would ask me to get my hair cut. I never did. Now the winking and blinking of various machines connected to a tangle of tubes woke me up; he had throat cancer.

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He had never smoked a day in his life. Stubbornness and his strong body would pull him through this. I unclasped my hand and he pulled me back, so I stayed for a long time...

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From Pittsburgh to New Orleans The light from the fire was unable to pierce the darkness around us. No matter where you sat, the smoke drifted straight toward your eyes. My newfound comrades were drinking what they called ood water booze. It was presented to me as being a necessary ritual after a day of hurricane clean-up. Yes, you could only find it searching through abandoned homes, but what a prize! People were thrusting these nameless mold- and dirt-encrusted bottles in my face and offering me their stash. I do not drink, so I faked it. There was a sense of peace in the midst of this postapocalyptic scenario, as people threw pieces of what used to be their homes onto the fire. It was very late when the party was over and it was time to make it back to St. Mary of the Angels Primary School, abandoned after Hurricane Katrina and the scene of a dramatic rescue; and now our home away from home.

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The school houses hundreds of volunteers gutting area homes seven days a week. As we slowly walked back, the war zone landscape became acute: metal and wood and dirt in an upheaval, forming twisted sculptures. One of my fellow volunteers, and a bona fide local, Eli, was talking about the trouble he was having with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as we passed through a never-ending corridor of utterly destroyed houses. When we finally arrived at St. Marys, the only sound was that of the diesel generators droning away, bringing the barest of lighting to our base of operations. The hallway was lit just enough for me to find my way back to what was once a classroom, and now a mass bedroom. I quietly crawled into my bottom bunk, and quickly fell asleep. This was my first night in what used to be the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. I was a guest of the Common Ground Collective. This was my third trip to New Orleans. And in just over two months, hurricane season would descend upon the Gulf Coast once again.

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Malik Rahim Throughout the hero-shy anarchist community, the name of Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, has come up over and over again. My curiosity piqued, I made my way to the Common Ground Collective Relief Operations press conference. We had arrived a bit early and were dismayed at the lack of turnout from the mainstream press. Nevertheless, up to the stage lumbered a large old man with graying dreadlocks. I introduced myself and asked if I could interview him after the press conference. He threw back his head and laughed and said, Why not now? As I set up my gear we talked, like old friends, having much in common from our varied experiences in the sixties. But more importantly, we were still active almost forty years later. Weve burned too many bridges. Selling out is not an option. Malik was original equipment, he was for real. As I realized this, I relaxed and a wonderful conversation owered amid the rubble.

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Malik, talk to us about when you were young and started to become active. My activism started in 1962 or 1963. I saw a very courageous hero of mine, Reverend Avery Alexander, sit at a counter in New Orleans City Hall cafeteria. For that he was jerked off the counter and dragged up two or three flights of stairs to the mayors office. Then after they talked to the mayor about how he had the nerve to go into the lunch counter, he was dragged back down the stairs. The only reason why this was happening was because he was black. At that time it truly opened my eyes to just how blatant the racism was. I knew that I had to make a choice, yknow. So my awareness basically started then. My activism itself started in 1970 when I joined the Black Panther Party. Tell us about the Black Panther chapter here. The party was started here by a person named Steve Green who came down under the direction of Geronimo Pratt from Los Angeles to organize, not necessarily a chapter, but to organize. Steve came down with three hundred newspapers, met two brothers, and from there they started selling the papers and just going out and raising awareness. I found out they were doing this maybe a month, month and a half after they started. Thats when we started what was known as the NCCF: the National Committee to Combat Fascism. Theres been a lot of talk about violence and revolution, revolutionary violence and class war it goes on and on, and

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Im sure youre surrounded by this talk. I was part of it. I was entrenched in it as a member of the Panther Party. We were armed and we advocated selfdefense. One of the greatest, most profound events that ever happened in my life took place when the police came to raid our office and the community surrounded our office. Men in public housing, in the Deep South, surrounded our office and told the police, You will not raid this office. What they did was an act of nonviolence, civil disobedience. The police were trying to tell the people to get out of the way, and Im not talking about ten or twenty or one hundred or two hundred. Im talking between two to three thousand people surrounding our office to prevent the police getting in. I thought a shootout was going to happen and I figured theyll probably kill us and well get some of them. But its not justice, you know, it might be revenge but not justice. Every act of violence will be just to the winners and unjust to those who were being victimized. Theres no justice in violence and without that there can be no peace. I believe that everything Ive been doing in the thirty-six years Ive been involved in the struggle for peace and justice its all been a glorious experience. I believe Ive been blessed to meet some of the greatest people that I would want to meet in my lifetime. Would you mind speaking a bit on the origins of Common Ground? Common Ground came out of Hurricane Katrina.

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Scott Crow and I founded Common Ground on September 5, 2005. So what you have seen has happened since then. At the time, at our kitchen table, Sharon Johnson, my partner, had thirty dollars and I had twenty, and with that fifty dollars we started Common Ground. Then we started contacting activist people we knew on the phone and over the internet. I called other people to contact activists I did not know. Through that chain and the wonderful efforts of Scott and Brandon Darby, we went from four people to twenty. Then one day, I was walking my dog and as I was coming home, I said to myself, What in the world is going on? There were sixty people standing on my porch. Ever since then we have grown. Since September 2005, we have had well over seven to eight thousand volunteers. During spring break we have had over twenty-seven hundred volunteers. They have gutted out over three hundred and fifty houses that are now ready to be rebuilt. It will take ten to twelve years to rebuild New Orleans, but it must be rebuilt, in every aspect, by the people of peace and justice. We have done what the government refuses to do and is not capable of doing. We have been shown around to the different aspects of Common Ground and are amazed. There is so much going on and its a lot more about justice than about disaster relief. Disaster relief organizations basically deal with natural or national disasters. But see, this wasnt a national or natural disaster this was a national tragedy. People came down because of the tragedy, because of the injustice. We didnt make a call just to those who believe in bringing relief. We made a call to those who stood for peace and justice to come down. Our advocacy is paramount.

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I told you about what happened with Rev. Avery Alexander. The only other time in my life I saw such an event was in 1963 or 1964, and then in 2005 when I saw AfricanAmericans being denied access into another parish just because they were African-American and coming from New Orleans. Nothing in my history prepared me for the fact that here in a state of emergency, with people fleeing for their lives, in America, that one section of America would be denied access to another population of Americans simply because they are the wrong color. Its obvious that rebuilding is going to take more than a year or two. Its will take a long time to wrench out of the system the injustice it has done. It seems like theres going to be a lot of work for a lot of years. Oh yes, oh yes. The rebuilding of New Orleans will probably take somewhere between ten and twelve years. Thats if New Orleans is ever rebuilt, because the first thing we have to do is start thinking smart. We need to stop thinking about preserving or rebuilding levees. We need to start restoring and preserving our wetlands. Thats the first thing we need to do. And we need to be talking about really building a strong protection system, one that works with nature rather than trying to control nature. Then we can rebuild our city a great city, a progressive city, I believe one of the most progressive cities in the world. And I believe we can. We have opportunities here, such as the opportunity to break the shackles of our fossil fuel dependency. We need to explore this and encourage and implement. No other city has these opportunities. We have the opportunity to turn this big lemon into real lemonade, and I dont believe we

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can do it unless the activist community, those who truly stand for peace and justice, wherever they are, come and do the work. And thats what I see here. During spring break more than twenty-eight hundred students came from two hundred universities, and from eight countries. I mean, they came down, answered our call, and pitched in and worked; they did a wonderful job. They gutted almost three hundred homes. Then we did churches, businesses including Kohlmans, and were doing another one further down the street. We operate three health clinics, one has become a permanent health clinic. All this has happened in seven months, and the only reason why this great phenomenon has occurred is because of the greatness of the American people. Not the government. I think we have a rich government, a powerful government, but I dont think we have a great government. But I do know the greatness of the American people and of those who really stand for peace and justice. Years after Im dead and gone, when people think about what happened in New Orleans, theyll always think about the courage and fortitude of those who have made such sacrifices to come down and help in the rebuilding of New Orleans. We have done what the city refused to do, and Im not talking about the work. Im talking about bringing people together. For the first time in the history of this city you see whites in the Lower Ninth Ward working side by side with African-Americans, in many case whites working inside the houses of African-Americans, to help people get their lives back in order. Just think what thats doing to the racism thats here. Seeing this in the Deep South, Im telling you this is not someplace else. During slavery, half of the slaves who were brought into this country came straight through New Orleans. But now you see people coming and

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trying to break the edifice weve built to separate ourselves. And its done more for race relations and offered hope. Our health clinic in Algiers, the first one, started off as a first aid station. Now were a fully accredited health facility. Were hoping that one day that health clinic can blossom into a solidarity hospital. We have offered new health services in a community that has been absent health care for at least the fiftyeight years Ive been on this earth. Now they have a permanent health center and were doing it, no one but the activist community. When I say we, I dont mean just Common Ground, I mean the activist community that is down here, whether people are working for The Peoples Hurricane Fund, SOS, or other organizations. The great sacrifices they are making for peace and freedom cant be ignored. You cant ignore the positive change. Well, Malik, it was great to finally meet you. Thank you for your time. Thank you, man. Listen, its the alternative media that make the difference. Theres always been an alternative media in Louisiana, in America. The reason slavery ended is because of the alternative party. Workers rights are due to the alternative movement. There has always been alternative media to expose the lies of the mainstream and force them to tell the truth. So I thank you.

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Community and Nonviolent Confrontation It was once said by lawyer/theologian William Stringfellow that, in our age, every relationship would be marked by violence. I live in a community that preforms acts of hospitality for the homeless. In the last months of 1993, on the 1300 block of Sheffield Street where I live, we have seen unprecedented violence. Because of a drug deal gone bad, a fourteen-year-old girl drew a shotgun and killed her drug contact. Not even a week later, a young man died in a drug overdose. Recently there was a drive-by shooting less than a block from my home, which severed the spine of an eighteen-year-old man as he stood on the steps of a church all this witnessed by a busload of elementary school students. Countless times the neighborhood drug task force has broken down peoples doors, in the vain hope of finding drugs. Within our home for the homeless we have seen the fruit of years of neglect and abuse that leaves men in their twenties with no hope for the future. Vietnam veterans and people who are physically or mentally ill, upon their arrival, look as if physically beaten-up. This violence is the result of being forced to call the streets ones home.

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They say if an individual feels no remorse after killing someone, that person is insane. Even though we have experienced three thousand dead in Panama; well over three hundred thousand dead in Iraq; over two hundred billion dollars spent for operations Just Cause, Desert Storm, and Restore Hope; the military intervention in Somalia; the threats of air strikes on Bosnia, and a military restoration of democracy in Haiti, the list of our enemies still seems endless. After years of confronting the military contracting done at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and its Software Engineering Institute (SEI), I was told that calling into question the relationship between academia and the military was an obscure approach to peacemaking. Documentation has confirmed ties between the Computer Science department and Operation Desert Storm. Adding insult to injury, CMU is now peddling to research bomb damage assessment done by its intelligent bombs. Insanely, no remorse is felt! The tragic injustice of such a slaughter transpired and transpires at the very cradle of civilization, along the Tigris and Euphrates. This moral amnesia of a blind society is indicative of a nation that refuses to see the suffering it has caused and continues to inflict through sanctions that deny basic food and medical supplies to reach an estimated seven hundred fifty children under the age of five dying every day in Iraq. Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic priest and anti-war activist, has stated that while the remnant of the peace movement attempts to assess the damage done to Iraq, it has avoided assessing the damage done to our moral conscience that will allow the next war to occur. With that thought in mind, I would like to recognize four activities/attitudes much needed by those people who try desperately to be compassionate.

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First, we need to build community and not organizations. If, in fact, our times are marked by violence and our relationships are broken, then within our fragile relations, and within ourselves, we must concentrate our energies to be a community and not concern ourselves with the logistics of building an organization. Once trust is established, the necessary organizational structure will follow. If we are going to capture peoples imagination, surely it is not to be through boring routines of meetings, panel discussions, lectures, demonstrations, and fund-raisers. There must be a way to build community through creatively confronting the system, the collective mirror of our fracturedness. This might at first appear as impractical idealism. But one has only to attend these repetitive activities to know these boring routines only inspire pettiness and infighting among groups. Perhaps we need to seek the counsel of those in the arts, the visually oriented, and those in literature, who can teach us about the imagination. Perhaps it is in the context of these communities that we can learn new ways of capturing peoples imagination, which is so desperately needed, as opposed to mastering Roberts Rules of Order. Second, we must bury our glorification of violence and experiment with nonviolence to confront the injustice of war. During the sixties I was kept awake countless nights by people who talked about violent revolution. One time Gandhi did say, It would be better to pick up a gun than to give way to the cowardice of inactivity, but of all the hundreds of people I have worked with over the years, not one of these violent revolutionaries has ever picked up a gun against an oppressive government or a police force. If you are approached by people who express the necessity for violent revolution while, ironically,

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employing the tactics of nonviolent demonstrations, tell them the following story. Once, in the early sixties, Malcolm X was confronted by the unjust arrest of two young black men in Harlem. He took with him fifty young black men down to the police station. They asked for the release of the two young men, much to the surprise of the all-white police force. Emphatically, he stated that they would not leave until these men were released. He then stated that each member of the group was willing to be arrested himself, if the police did not meet their demands. There was Malcolm X, the man who said, By any means necessary, employing a nonviolent tactic to confront the injustice of the police. This was a man who at the end of his life refused to call white people devils, and was murdered for this unorthodox belief. Suffice it to say the two men were freed. There is enough hate in the universe. Those who call themselves activists should not add to this through empty violent words. The time for talking is over. Action is needed. Are there fifty people today willing to stand nonviolently in the way of this oppressive nation before it kills again? Third, we must learn. We must struggle to be with the people, the oppressed. Those deemed useless by society must be our closest friends. Our world-view must be completely developed by seeing through their eyes. We dont do this out of a sense of paternalism or superiority, but out of a sense of solidarity with those who have been abandoned by this dying culture. Tangibly, this means to move into areas of a city where the poor reside, to travel to parts of the world where the victims of our violence lie, ultimately to become a refugee, an outlaw. Though we may never experience what it is like to be a Salvadoran, a Palestinian, a Vietnamese, an Iraqi, a Native American, a Somali, a Bosnian,

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to have guns shoved in our faces daily, to be constantly reminded of the effect of the intelligence of US bombs, we must not avert our gaze from the suffering whomever, or wherever, they may be. Because the oppression of the poor and the victims of war is always legal, we must relinquish our privilege. Let no luxury be enjoyed until every need is met. We leave behind forever all academic activism that has us standing detached from the harsh realities we claim to be confronting. Put simply, we no longer call these people homeless or oppressed, but we call them by name, for they have become our closest friends. Fourth, and finally, a much-neglected aspect of activism is healing. If we open our hearts to the realities around us, our most natural and, I dare say, most healthy response is despair. There is in fact something to be depressed about. In our attempts to fight this rotten system we will become wounded. These uncharted waters must be explored if our community and our activism are to reflect any type of longevity in the face of insurmountable odds. We must not give in to our fears. Only love can drive out the fear that has caused us to lack the courage it takes to confront the system of hate. It would be collectively that we discover the nonviolent miracle that will overthrow this murderous empire.

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Pilgrimage to Los Alamos Conventional wisdom said that our collective nuclear nightmare was history. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Unions economy collapsed, and so ended the nuclear arms race. The year 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had spent the last two years on the road, soaking in the beauty of America before facing the guns of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Los Alamos National Laboratory was the only place in the country that assembled the plutonium triggers for both old and refurbished nuclear weapons, so I made the decision to make a prayer pilgrimage to the labs as a way of marking the commemoration of the unthinkable. Los Alamos is located in northern New Mexico, atop the Pajarito Plateau in the Jemez Mountains. Almost one and a half miles above sea level, the air is thin and the water boils at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The ora of the high desert is unusually beautiful, lending a metaphysical aspect to the landscape. The beauty of the ride up the mountain road and the steep walls of the mesa that houses the secret city cannot

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be expressed in words. You see the sienna-colored mountains, the gnarled junipers and the wisps of cloud as you ascend the only road to this place where the Navajo once lived, and where the Tewa Pueblo ruins abandoned cliff dwellings dating from about 1225 AD now stand. You only have to look east at sunset, to the Pajarito and Sangre de Cristo, to see why the mountains were once called the Blood of Christ. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb, had envisioned a laboratory in a beautiful setting that could be an inspiration to his scientists. After witnessing the first nuclear explosion, named Trinity, on July 16th, 1945, he recalled two lines from the Bhagavad Gita: If the radiance of a thousands suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... and I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Being in this violated paradise I could not help but recall the old story of the Tower of Babel: And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

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At sunrise on January 2, 1995, the first working day of the year, I made my way through the driving snow to Area TA55. As I approached the entrance to the plutonium pit, the only sound was the snow crunching beneath my feet. Finally, I came to the road that led to Hells Kitchen and walked toward the line of vehicles waiting to gain entrance for another day of work. There were two sets of gates. The vehicles were being locked in between them as security searched beneath and around them. As the next automobile entered, I slipped in and let the door come down behind me. Then I knelt down to pray for peace. Immediately, a female guard turned around and asked me what I was doing. Looking up through the driving snow, I replied, I have come here to pray for peace. In a professional manner, the guard cried out, Oh, shit! As if on cue, thirty-six guards appeared, lined up and pointed their M-16s at me. And then we waited. After a very long time the Los Alamos police arrived. They were visibly frightened. From a safe distance, they slowly asked me if I spoke English, deliberately pronouncing each syllable: Do... you... speak... Eng... lish? Very carefully, I responded in this same strange meter: Yes... I... do... The female cop asked if I was wired with explosives, pointing to the bulge under my army coat. I assured her that it was only my stomach and she laughed; Khrushchev blinked. The tension melted away and I was cuffed, placed under arrest, and taken to jail. Because of my intrusion all hell had broken loose. I was later to learn that I was the first person to intentionally cross the line at the labs, that no one present knew how to react. The fact that I was able to enter the premises of this highly secured area (one of the most secure places on the planet) unmolested made

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my incursion a breach of biblical proportions. After hours spent at the police station (this was before computerized background checks) I was brought before Judge Elaine Morris. Given the number of attendees, including police, security personnel, federal agents and several unidentified suits, the court room was torturously quiet. I sat there, smiling, not participating in the legal proceedings. Finally, the judge asked in quiet frustration, Why have you come to Los Alamos? I replied, I got here as soon as I could! The courtroom burst into nervous laughter and I was taken to the local pokey with an entourage rivaling that of a visiting dignitary. Refusing to pay the thirtyfive dollar fine, I began what would be ninety-seven days of free room and board. The local peace community was very welcoming and supportive. Helen Caldicott, an international anti-nuclear celebrity, went out of her way to visit me during my incarceration. Letters from all over the country started pouring in from peace folk, and journalists from all over New Mexico made their way up the mountain to meet the intruder. The guards at the facility were puzzled by this unprecedented period of activity. They could not understand why I would choose to remain. Through the Catholic Worker grapevine, Martin Sheen had heard that I was facing a lot of jail time. He called and, surprisingly, the warden gave me five minutes to talk. When Martin told me that he wanted to help, I asked him to attend the trial in April. He assured me that he would be there. At 4:00 AM on the morning of the trial, April 11, 1995, one of the guards woke me up, shouting: Martin Sheen is here. He flew in on a Learjet! So the media circus began. The courts forced a local lawyer on me, Dana Kanter

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Grubesic, and we got along famously. I told her that we were not going to present a legal defense, but that we were going to have a lot of fun. She laughed, saying that she liked my nonlegal strategy. The court was tailor-made for kangaroos. Martin Sheen kept the focus of his testimony on the continuing nuclear nightmare. High school and college classes were brought in by their teachers, there were lots of federal and nuclear security officials and a gaggle of local peace people. The entire jury of my peers consisted of Los Alamos Labs employees. In a letter to the editor of the Albuquerque Journal, a lab employee wrote that the trial was a waste of public money. I replied in my own published letter that the trial was not to be missed, and would be well worth the price of admission. During the proceedings we were prevented from addressing the work that was being done in the labs, in the interest of national security. Martin Sheens Oscar-worthy performance, however, went uninterrupted. Afterwards, the DA approached him for his autograph. At one point during the trial I was pulled into a room by the FBI. Is it your intention to reveal the security procedures of the lab? I was asked. Every one of them! was my reply. We laughed a long time, and then I asked them if they could send me home by train. Upon being found guilty, the prosecution asked for the maximum sentence of three hundred sixty-four days in jail and a thousand-dollar fine, but the judge refused, saying that she doubted more jail time would do me any good. I dont think that remorse is something were going to see here, she said at the sentencing. I dont think thats even a factor. I have no doubt that

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youll soon be back doing these kinds of things. With an admonition to never return to Los Alamos, I waved to the bewildered feds as the train pulled away. Conventional wisdom said that with the end of the Cold War, so ended the nuclear nightmare. What we didnt know was that in January, as I began my third week in jail, the world had come within minutes of nuclear war. In the middle of the night, Russian radar detected a nuclear missile launch from an American submarine heading toward Moscow. President Boris Yeltsin activated the nuclear briefcase, the first step toward launching the countrys two thousand some nuclear weapons that remain pointed at the United States. Luckily, before he could finalize his decision, the missile, actually a misidentified Norwegian research vessel (which the Russian military had been warned of in advance) plunged safely into the sea. And World War III was once again avoided.

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In the sixth grade Vincent took trumpet lessons much to his parents dismay.

Uncle Joe

Vincent celebrates the opening of SEI in 1987.

Vincent was a frequent visitor to the old Allegheny County Jail. Photo by Seth Dickerman (1988).

Night Flight to Baghdad

From Vietnam to Iraq In April 1975, as I was graduating from Ohio State University, the Vietnam War ended. At the time I was working to raise money for Bach Mai. A hospital the size of the Mayo Clinic, it was destroyed by the United States in the 1972 Christmas bombing. Fifty-eight thousand Americans were killed in Vietnam, 3.2 million Vietnamese died and, according to a 1979 Senate subcommittee report, more American veterans committed suicide after returning home than were lost in Vietnam. After the war and out of harms way, American activists never challenged the sanctions on Vietnam that persisted for twenty years, until 1995. These sanctions bled the country to death and isolated Vietnam from the world. Once lifted, it was obvious that the sanctions had done what the war could not do: whip the country into submission. Foreign companies moved in to draw from one of the largest untapped reserves of oil in Southeast Asia, and Nike was welcomed with open arms, paying their new workers twentyeight dollars a month. A Vietnamese worker making shoes would have to labor several months to be able to purchase a pair of Air Jordan high-tops. When America once again invaded Iraq, the parallels between this war and Vietnam became increasingly clear.

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After a year of fundraising, we finally raised enough money to fly to Baghdad for the first anniversary of the second Iraq War on March 20, 2004. That is how Geoff Kelly of Pittsburghbased alternative newspaper Pulp and I found ourselves in two beefed-up SUVs, speeding down the Highway of Death from Amman, Jordan. This was known as the Highway of Death because of those murdered by US troops while attempting to escape Iraq at the end of the war in 1991. Now the road is a favorite of the Ali Baba-style roving bands of thieves. Driving through eight hours of unbroken red sand, one is too tired to be scared. Sleep comes in fits. Occupation Watch, our hosts for the visit, ran us hard over the next week. We met doctors at public hospitals, professors and students at a university, a cleric at a religious school, artists, writers, intellectuals, communists, the homeless living in a bombed-out building, a committee dealing with unemployment issues, and an engineer at the site of a rebuilt water treatment center in Fallujah. At each location I pulled out my tape recorder and mic.

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The Public Hospital The most memorable of all the locations was a public hospital, where I talked with a doctor who guided us through the stark facility. What follows is the transcript of our tour. Dr. Alaa Yusuf: Our emergency units still lack essential equipment, but we have the ABC drugs the fluids, antibiotics. But if were talking about the emergency unit, there are special drugs for special cases, which should be provided. Still, now, were waiting. Nothing came yet. Nothing. Were trying to do the best in our jobs. We did our best. Were trying to do our best here. But you know we need support, very big support. Nothing has changed really. Maybe theyve painted the walls, new furniture, but were talking about critical equipment and new drugs. Now youre going to see our intensive care unit, then were going to go to the pediatric unit and the pediatric ward. The doctors themselves are going to tell you what we see here, what we do.

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ER chief: We do not have the drugs that are needed in an emergency situation. Drugs that we need in medical cases such as calcium glutamate, sometimes isobutomol solution for those patients with bronchial asthma, are unavailable. We may shift to other types of drugs. Sometimes there is a deficiency of certain equipment like canulas and syringes. In surgical cases there is difficulty in getting some of the drugs such as certain antibiotics. In a patient that is allergic to penicillin, we have difficulties in giving antibiotics. Sometimes we have troubles in the X-ray department. We have only one machine that works, and this machine has not worked well. Certain types of X-rays, such as plain abdominal X-ray, we cant get the benefit from the film, because the film is very shiny. Why, with borders open, are these drugs and equipment unavailable? Dr. Alaa Yusuf: You dont ask us this question. You must go to the ministry and ask why. Other groups came here and asked the same question. Why? The sanctions have been lifted for one year. Why? Not only just the drugs, but why isnt everything? ER chief: Such intensive drugs as cortisone, sometimes we have only five vials for twenty-four hours. Dr. Alaa Yusuf: There is a share for every call. So they say, These are your drugs. Deal with it, whatever comes beyond this share, send for from outside. And if its after midnight, you cant find a pharmacy, so keep the patient without this medication until the morning.

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[The ER chief describes some patients who have come in with renal pain, but he has no analgesia, so he gives them IV fluid with a sedative so theyll sleep.] ER chief: I have no other choice. Dr. Alaa Yusuf: You just sedate the patient. Always supportive measures; you cant treat the cause. You just give him attention. You just go around the disease, just to sedate the patient, support him, until the morning comes, then give him the medication if its available. Thats an if. If its available in the pharmacy. Otherwise, please go out to the market, buy us some. Weve heard back in America that even doctors dont have money for medication for their own children. Dr. Alaa Yusuf: In the old days, everyone used to receive maybe two dollars, three dollars each month. Now salaries are going up to maybe two hundred, two hundred fifty dollars, which is the lowest of the lowest of the lowest of the doctors in the United States. A junior doctor, a rotator, who works in a junior hospital not a general hospital maybe gets fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars per month. Hes under training and may go up if he gets a job. What Im getting at is the prices in the market didnt change maybe went up. I lost my father to multiple myeloma. Would my salary I got two hundred, two hundred fifty dollars cover my fathers medication until he passed? Everybody here, when he has a problem, if he doesnt go and look for support from his family maybe not his family directly, his father or mother, but from his tribe then he cannot support himself. Me, as a doctor, Im supposed to be the light of

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a community, isnt that right? So if I cant support myself, who can? ER chief: This is the type of needle we use in the hospital. I cannot use it in children. I cannot use it in shock patients. Dr. Alaa Yusuf: Theres no handle for it, you see. I dont know how to use it. Im the best sorry, supposed to be the best in the hospital. But if I insert in a central venous line, subclavial, which is very complicated, believe me, its easier for me to insert this camera in a shock patient. I dont know where This is a postwar delivery. We didnt see this before the war. They got millions and millions of dollars of funds. Theyve got the oil money. They got our bank money, which was before 1990. This is a simple thing. Its not costly. Why are they bringing us the worst types? These people here deserve better. The Iraqi people have suffered. From 1991 they have suffered. We are losing patients, we are losing friends, we are losing relatives, we are losing a lot of people around us. Its normal, someone dying around you. Its normal, hearing a bomb or a shot. Its normal, its part of life. Just like going to have a coffee in your coffee shop. Its normal for you. Its normal for us that I turn okay, my neighbors dead. Thats normal. I go to the hospital oh, theres four patients shot, were going to operate. Its normal. Its part of our life. Its the new Iraqi method of living: Goodbye, family, I may not come back. We people doing our jobs, these people doing their jobs we deserve better. Who are bringing these? Is there a theoretical budget through the ministry for buying drugs? Is it all getting siphoned?

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Dr. Alaa Yusuf: No. You see, the system here is the old system. The system didnt change. The ministry buys the drugs from the companies that are dealing with the ministry. Only private hospitals and private clinics are allowed to deal with their own sources of drugs and their own sources of equipment. They can buy whatever you want. So its easier for me and them to go to a private hospital if I want better service at good pay. So private hospitals are better equipped with drugs? Dr. Alaa Yusuf: Supposed to be. But whos to pay? If you have somebody you love in the family, youll pay whatever you have to save them. You can borrow money, you can put up your house for mortgage, if you want to save your beloved one. So you must pay. But the very poor people who are coming to our hospital here; if you go around your hospital, you can see the really low social class which most of the Iraqi people are, the majority are low social, economically. Most people are out of jobs. People who have jobs have very low incomes, maybe the lowest in the Middle East. How many people do you see a day? ER chief: We see every day about five to ten cases of bullet injury per day. Whats the source of those injuries? ER chief: Different.

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[He then starts to list kinds of injuries, and turns and speaks to Yusuf quietly in Arabic, who tells him he can say anything he wants.] Dr. Alaa Yusuf: He was trying to talk about excessive force. Excessive force in the United States is a violation. Its a violation against even a killer. If a policeman used excessive force even against a killer, he would go to court and be sentenced. He would be out of his job and he wont find a job on the police force. These guys here [indicating security guards] never use excessive force. Theyve been with us since the first day they were appointed. They search us, they searched you, but theyre doing their duties. So if one guy shoots at them, they shoot back at that guy. They dont shoot at the whole street. Why? Why, on the day of the Ashura [a religious holiday]? People start to hate against the United States. Not the people, the policy. It was a very religious day for them. For the Shia, its a very important day. So an explosion happened. Whos responsible? The security. The occupation is responsible. The occupation is responsible for our security, for our living. Thats in Geneva Im not saying that, people are saying that. Geneva, and the United States signed on that agreement, if Im not wrong. So why are they using excessive force? Why arent they protecting? Why are the borders still open so these people are alert for me? They shouldnt be alert they should be happy to receive nice people like you, and nice doctors like him. Maybe were good neighbors, maybe were friends. Why should they feel alert? Because the borders arent safe. And who is responsible for appointing security forces? Arent their hands to protect these borders? There are thousands of youth who are strong with good belief to protect the borders.

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Im not accusing anybody, but they can do better. They can do a very good job. The Iraqi army was one million. Im not talking about officers most of this army was not loyal to the old regime. They are forced to be in the army. They could use these people and put them on the border, so these guys have a good time protecting our hospital, being nice to you and being nice to me. Isnt there money? Iraq is full of money. If I put my hand under this hospital, I can assure you Ill bring back money. Im sure of it. There is everything here. I should be rich, you should be rich, everybody should be rich. I dont know why were not all rich. I dont care. Theres money for everybody. Dont we have money? We have money. We have money from the banks. We have money that was given from Madrid. We have money in international banks. We have the personal money for the old regimes. We have the money in the ground, which is going out by American oil companies. Theyre giving us salaries. Oh, thank you. Its our right to get our good salaries. Hes taking two hundred ninety-six thousand dinars doing one of the worst jobs, risking his life, on a duty he may be killed and his sons may be orphans, for two hundred thirty dollars? I am risking my life from infections, from HIV, from hepatitis B, from hepatitis C, from many infectious diseases, for two hundred thirty dollars. In the old days when I used to take two dollars, Im not satisfied. I cant do anything. If I say, This is wrong, Im dead. You came; give us something. Its not charity money its our money. Im not begging anything from you. [He turns to an old man on a bed who is paralyzed and breathing through a tube in his throat.]

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This is Hajul Alij, he is a religious man at the mosque. Hes a good prayer, he believes in God and he was shot going out of his mosque. By whom? Does anyone know? Dr. Alaa Yusuf: No, he was just shot. Hes been six months in our sporadic care unit. His problem is very easy. Its not a cut in the spinal cord, its just immobilization of the bone during compression of the level of CG on the spinal cord. He survived this whole period and now hes suffering severe depression. One of the causes of the depression is he got help from a German group and theyll take him and do the operation on their account. The problem is transportation. The problem is he cannot go to Jordan by ambulance because its a spinal injury movement. He must go by a helicopter or airplane. So how can they go to Germany if theres no transportation for him? So he will not benefit from whats offered to him. Can the German doctors come to him? Dr. Alaa Yusuf: They can, but our theaters arent equipped, are not qualified for such operations. Its easier to bring the patient than to bring in the whole team and bring the drugs. Yeah, you see, its samples. What you give, what anybody gives, its samples. What UNICEF gives, its samples. Its not the real need of the Iraqi medical community. Its a sales technique: This is our company product. The other day a group came in and they bring in multivitamins. Distributed on the same day. Tomorrow is going to happen. The day after tomorrow is going to happen. One

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day oxygen was not present in our pediatric unit. Look at him. Hes just a number, a statistic, in the United States. Look at yourself. Youre going to go back to the United States and say, Oh, poor Iraqi people, and then have a good life. Im sorry if Im quite blunt with you, but thats true. Maybe youre going to talk about it for one, two, three or four weeks. Maybe therell be a campaign or two for easing suffering, but then youll go back to your life. And well come back to our life. Do charitable groups abroad send drugs and equipment? [Dr Yusuf pulls the old mans tube so he can speak and translates for him.] Dr. Alaa Yusuf: A man, when he cries, he cries for a cause. I dont cry for myself. Im crying for my country, which has been destroyed, which has been lost. The people paying the most for this are people being killed. The United Nations, united on us, wants to kill every Arabic person. Just like in Vietnam. We are a very highly qualified and historical country. We are a learned people, with history and education. They destroyed our country with their airplanes and guns. We are not ignorant people. We knew, and we know. The Sunni one whos killing the Shia one is the same that are killing the other side. He means they want to make a civil war between the Sunni and the Shia. This is why he was shot. Hes a Sunni religious man, so who shot him? Oh, its the Shia. Nobody in this room believes that a Shia may shoot a Sunni, and that a Sunni may shoot a Shia. This man whos been shot, and they tried to leak the message to him that a Shia shot him, has said, I dont believe you. We are not ignorant people, hes trying to say. We are highly intelligent, well

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not believe in any story. We want occupation to go out. We want our people to be united. Im paralyzed, but I have hope. Those fighting now are good people, which will help us in our crisis. We have been hurt by the past regime, but this regime is far worse. This one has been arrested and been abused by the past regime because he tore up pictures of the ex-president. Our community is one. He has a grocery on which have been thrown grenades. Hell never sell his country. Hes getting better thanks to God, not to us. Were able to do less than five percent of what American doctors can do to help their patients.

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Orientation I sat there in the Occupation Watch office in central Baghdad, drifting away as people explained the weeks activities. I was enveloped in a city crushed by the stupidity of war; there was no relief from this assault on ones senses. The power going off and on all day, being trapped in elevators, diesel fuel generators that caused my asthma to flare up, the disbelief in the eyes of people as we passed them in the car. The piercing look was not one of anger but of curiosity at seeing unveiled, beardless foreigners and non-embedded journalists. There was no garbage pick-up, so trash was burned in vacant lots. Everywhere armed police, in the hotel, on street corners; everywhere long rifles, most with the safety off. Traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic... Roads blown up and not repaired, two of the main bridges in disrepair, gas lines that made the gas crisis in the US during the seventies look like a picnic. Bumper car madness, hours and hours and hours just to travel to another part of Baghdad. Burning tires sending up a solid wall of thick, sticky black smoke to throw off laser-guided missiles. Little girls jumping on the side of the car begging for a few dinars, eyes intense, smiling, refusing to let go.

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This was the fish bowl our delegation was trapped in. Not even a satellite phone call home would offer a bit of relief as we were made to sit on the roof, for fear of being seen and shot by snipers if we stood up. For a brief moment I experienced what others must endure for a lifetime, a culture and city destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed, a determination no gringo will ever realize. For now, this was home. As I came out of my daydream, the orientation was almost over. In mocking fashion I shot up my hand and asked where we could get a falafel. The two serious, serious young women draped in traditional garb broke their silence and giggled, the room burst into laughter. Apparently falafels are not Iraqi fare but a Jordanian dish, so in honor of the ridiculous request we headed to a Jordanian restaurant for lunch. Our first day in Baghdad had begun.

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Reflection on March 20, 2004 This letter was emailed home and was to be read for the M20 protest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the occasion of the first anniversary of Americans invasion of Iraq. Hello from Baghdad from Blast Furnace Radio. I have been here with a delegation of journalists from across the US and Canada for the past week. With the help of the Global Exchange and Occupation Watch, I have visited hospitals with no medicine, in dire need of staff to care for the sick. I have interviewed doctors and have seen countless patients afflicted with cancer or birth defects caused by depleted uranium residue from weaponry used by American and British forces. I have seen a town filled with soldiers and commissioned police who have plunged the city into a state of fear. I have met scores of unemployed people over half the population of Baghdad is unemployed. I have walked around this bombed-out city, its theaters, schools, mosques that are looted and burned. I have experienced the constant blackouts the people must endure all day long. I have seen the prisons holding ten thousand detainees, with no way for families or lawyers to assist them. For the last four nights I have felt the bombs shake our hotel. One explosion smashed out several of our windows.

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But I have also met determined students plotting how to rebuild their culture. I have met disabled people who have built their own center without funding from the provisional government. I have met with squatters, writers, intellectuals and homeless people, all determined to rebuild what has been destroyed by two wars, twelve years of sanctions, and now the occupation. I am bringing their testimonies home with me. Today, the first anniversary of the beginning of the war, we must raise our voices for peace. Today is the beginning of the work of peace that will allow Iraq to live. I have experienced for just a moment what the people of Iraq have had to live with for over a decade. I join with others in Pittsburgh today protesting this injustice and the war contracting of Carnegie Mellon University. And I thank Pittsburgh Organizing Group (POG) for their organizational genius in pulling together people of compassion from all over our region.

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War Criminal My fingerprints are all over the battle plans, on the trigger, on the button that launches the missiles. No court has yet indicted me, but I know. I watched on as the Baghdad museums and libraries were being looted and set afire, articles and writings dating back to the Mesopotamian civilization and Ottoman period. Here, civilization began along the Tigris and Euphrates, and I watched as its memory ended. We were robbing the cradle of civilization, as the song goes. Outside of Baghdad rice is raised for the city since no imports are permitted by the United States commissioned provisional authority. This short-grain rice has a nutty taste, somewhat amber in color. I went with a platoon out to the rice paddies and bulldozed the new crop. The farmers came out screaming and yelling. I turned to our translator and told him to tell the farmers that this had to be done in case snipers were hiding in the fields. These are not the first rice paddies I have seen destroyed.

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Our translator stood there in disbelief and couldnt bring himself to translate my explanation. I am a war criminal and no court will ever bring me to trial, no court will convict me. I will never see the inside of a prison cell or face execution.

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Winking At Fallujah As the journalists made their way to Fallujah, a city north of Baghdad, the landscape seemed to change. I was informed that we were in Sunni country, an anti-American stronghold. As we made our way to this complex of big thick colorful pipes, I was amazed at how such a small purifying station could supply water to over sixty thousand people. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War financed its rehabilitation to the tune of twenty-two thousand dollars, and seeing this made the whole trip worthwhile. Whether the water treatment station was a target of the last two wars or whether it fell into disarray because of the US/ UN sanctions does not matter. The end result was the same; without the station, there was no clean water. This was a violation of the Stockholm Convention, a treaty signed by the US which states that to destroy facilities like this amounts to destroying a nations infrastructure, a violation of international law. This atrocity is unimaginable to those of us in North America: a city without clean, drinkable water, and the disease and social upheaval that comes from such a shortage.

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But my moment of Zen at Fallujah was interrupted. One driver excitedly suggested that we were in danger, pointing out the Sunnis gathering across the street. I told him that this was not true. In fact, I said to our little party, one of those guys just winked at you. Startled by the possibility, he physically jumped backwards! As we rode up and down the highway with Fallujah to our backs, the other driver and translator, Mahr, mockingly winked at him and we all laughed hysterically.

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The Psychiatrist This interview with an Iraqi psychiatrist was conducted on March 25, 2004 and transcribed by Sandra L. Momper, social worker and Adjunct Professor of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh. For the kind of traumatization and destruction we have seen we need probably decades to start the program for the children, to start the process of what in psychology is called normalization. The first important cornerstone in this approach is to start with a PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) program. We did, in fact, and we managed to work for a while, just a while, because we lost an important hinge of our program in UNICEF. UNICEF was obliged to leave. We had a collaborative program with UNICEF to establish whats called a back to play and step to play program which helped the children to establish a better rapport with their schools. But on the first day of the first workshop there was a bombing of the UN. We couldnt go on this workshop because the UNICEF was obliged to leave.

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Then we started our program by having training courses and educational programs for the teachers, for the counselors, for the pediatrician and for the psychiatrists. We thought that we need to create a mental health awareness. We talked to the parents, the teachers and the counselors, that they should behave in a different way this year, for the children. They should play an important role in early diagnosis of the children who were traumatized, who exhibit abnormal behavior in school. They are definitely children reluctant to join the school, reluctant to study, reluctant to play, etc., etc. All these things. Could you once again state the accumulative noticeable effects on children in terms of play? Part of our work was a back to play, step to play program, because true play has so many roles. First of all it helps to build the rapport between the children and the school. Secondly, through play we can diagnose, we can watch for children who are reluctant to play or who play in an aggressive manner. That is an important part of early detection of the children and of course it will tell us the kind of early rehabilitation technique. Playing means rehabilitation. In play children will exhibit, or they vent, their aggression. We had a lot of work with UNICEF, we had manuals and packages prepared by the UNICEF. We were supposed to give each school that package of toys and manuals for the teachers to use during the scholastic year to help to implement the program. We lost that, Im sorry. We know the statistics of how many children and sick people are dying up to five thousand a month throughout the country and we know that the ministry is not allowed by

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the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) to really collect statistics on mortality and other things that would make it look bad. What is your sense about whether the situation for children, in terms of just numbers, mortality, malnutrition, has improved or gotten worse; and then, more generally, would you say children today, a year later, are better or worse off than under Saddam? If you have the chance, visit the general hospitals, the central hospitals in Baghdad. Bear in mind that this is the capital city of Baghdad where most of the senior pediatricians are. The Ministry of Health is very proximal to them. You have witnessed the situation there, its a very bad situation. Then just imagine the condition of hospitals far away in the south or in the north. Moreover, there are so many places in Iraq where there isnt even a primary health care center to offer primary health care to the children or to their families. I also believe that conditions have deteriorated during the last year. Of course you know the security issue. I know some of my colleagues were obliged to leave because they felt insecure. Further, I can enumerate so many doctors of my friends who were assassinated, or killed. Why? And this is a big question, because they are doctors. They are offering help to humanity. They are health care providers. Why should they be assassinated, because they used to be from another party, or this party? This is unacceptable, of course. So during the last year we lost a lot of professors, doctors and scientists who find a way out of the country because they feel that no one on earth can protect them or can help to protect

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them. I myself have been threatened over three or four times because they do not know that your work is a humanistic work and that you should work as a doctor whether you work with the enemy, with Americans, or with whomever else, that you should work because you are a doctor. But others have been unlucky. They were assassinated not only because they were working with Americans but just because they are what they are. And the risk is still there. Is it a political issue? Political issues, religious issues, so many kinds of issues. Those who investigate dont declare why that man was assassinated. The head of our University of Baghdad, Dr. Mohamed, a cardiologist, was assassinated in his clinic, and so many other doctors were assassinated either in their clinics or in their homes. I couldnt give you the exact number but you should ask those who are responsible. Yes, this is an ongoing process. As a matter of fact the traumatization of children is still ongoing. The bombing is still there. We have encountered a critical situation a few miles from here because of a week of bombings. So many bombings of the police stations have been very close to the primary school. Parents are very reluctant to send their kids back to school because they feel they are threatened and that they are going to sacrifice the lives of their children by sending them back to school. So they would prefer to keep them out from, rather than to send them to, school. This is a pity. I have asked so many of my colleagues from elsewhere whether they can assist. I told them that we do not have a crisis intervention team in Iraq. With casualties, we evacuate them to the hospitals, but we ourselves need to go to the site where the bombing took

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place and start counseling and talking to the people, offering a kind of help thats called crisis intervention. But in Iraq we have no child psychiatrists. We do not have a crisis intervention team. We do not have so many of the important things that constitute the infrastructure of a mental health program or system. From a holistic perspective, we are in a very desperate situation. We can help a patient individually at the hospital or clinic, but we cannot offer anything to the community as a community mental health program, a community wellness program, or whatever. So many of my colleagues feel paralyzed. They cant offer anything so they prefer to leave. How would you compare the stress and trauma of life under occupation for a child compared to life under Saddam Hussein? In fact, we had that comparison in our program and in our original proposal. Yes, the Iraq children have been very unlucky because they have been exposed to a lot of trauma. They were deprived. They didnt have the best of schools. They had the teachers who are underpaid and they did not have the best kind of learning. There have been so many kinds of traumatization. TV, the media, played an important role in that process, and that was in the Saddam era. But not only the children, but also their parents thought that the dark cloud would leave away after the collapse of Saddam. A lot of Iraqis had great expectations we would go to paradise and Iraq would be just like any American state prosperous.

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Empty Playgrounds It is a sort of unwritten principle by radical Catholic Workers that we need not go to war zones to document the suffering. We can see plenty of suffering in US towns with the abandoned, those locked away in hospitals, with those given just enough by the government to starve. As the logic goes, visiting is not only a misled act but wasteful. Perhaps that is how we lost the wars in Latin America and South America everyone came back with his or her obligatory little slide shows. I dare say that this was a form of radical voyeurism, a poor substitute for resistance. What was needed was to disrupt and dismantle the war machine. Still, to this day, people suffer in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, but the Left has moved on to other issues, more fresh and relevant crusades. After being in Iraq I feel that this principle that we should not venture forth from our communities is wrong. No photo, article, video clip, or audio interview could capture what I perceived in Iraq. What I perceived cannot be electronically rendered. What I brought home, what I witnessed was this: the utter humiliation of the Iraqi people, born from the fact that that they could not stop their country from being destroyed,

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they could not stop the lives of those around them from being ruined. We met a psychologist at the Artist Caf in Baghdad. As he talked, and talked, and talked, I zoned out and allowed others to hold the microphone. Upon reviewing his interview I heard what he said but I was still too distracted by the necessary, insane pace we kept. Weeks after arriving home I was watching my children play in a playground. Suddenly, I went into convulsive weeping. I remembered the words of the shrink at the Artist Caf, that he was seeking funds to counter the delayed stress syndrome of the Iraqi children. When Iraqi children were placed in a room with toys they did not play with each other. Fear of the future bombings have left children terrified of the openness and vulnerability of going to a playground. My children are safe, but the children of Iraq have been robbed of a future and of the simple joys of childhood.

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The Center of the Storm I have visited a ruined city with destroyed lives. It would have been easier if they were angry with me and my complicity. Instead they have treated me as an honored guest. It will take a lifetime to return this gesture of unmerited kindness. At the center of the storm we find our calm.

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Vincent took this picture in Baghdad in 2004. His children mistook it for Kennywood.

Soldiers ask Vincent to refrain from taking their picture.

Iraqis protest the US occupation.

Homeless siblings living in one of Saddam Husseins palaces.

Counterfeit Barbie magazines on display in an elaborate outdoor writers market in Baghdad.

The Mountains of West Virginia and the Children of Afghanistan

The Mountains of West Virginia and the Children of Afghanistan It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. Wendell Berry We who dare call ourselves people of peace have reached an impasse. Folk who voted for Obama are sitting back and waiting for him to stop the wars. The passivity continues, even as the wars continue to eat our young and our finite resources. It will take years to shake off this slumber and face the wars being fought. The Iraq War is said to be over while an occupation of over one hundred thousand military advisors continues. The war in Afghanistan, too, rages on. The Afghan people have never been conquered, owing in part to a decentralized power structure developed prior to modernization.

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They are armed with weapons provided by the US to kill their former Russian occupiers. Reagan called the Taliban his freedom fighters. Finally, we witness drones that bomb Pakistani terrorist training camps, and the US has prisoners being held indefinitely near the Pakistani airport. We find ourselves bogged down with the quagmire of Gitmo prisoners the base itself having been ordered closed in January 2009. And lately we have been faced with the humanitarian bombing of Libya. With all of this war, the spirits of people involved in anti-war activity have also been bogged down. You can only look into the sun so long before turning away. It was in this context that I was surprised to receive a phone call from eco-activists five hours south of Pittsburgh, near Beckley, West Virginia. I learned that they were fighting a relatively new way of coal mining, although not a very modern one: mountaintop removal. Mostly associated with the Appalachians in the Eastern United States, tops of mountains are literally being blown up and hauled away to get at the seam that lies underneath. The refuse is then moved into neighboring valleys. One looks at these bald mountains in disbelief. The air is polluted from explosions, streams are buried, tap water is turned sulfur brown, and huge coal sludge ponds are created a hazardous byproduct of a process that brings electricity to our homes, so our paddle fans can turn round and round. The phone call I received was from someone who thought I could help organize resistance in my neck of the woods. He had heard of our prayer pilgrimage to Pantex in Amarillo, Texas and of our subsequent imprisonment. In the eighties, near the end of the Cold War, Pantex was producing five nuclear weapons a day. That was twenty-eight years ago.

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When I asked him if it would not be more advantageous to find someone who had resisted the Spanish-American War, the person at the other end actually laughed a good sign in the often self-serious activist community. I promised I would swing by as soon as time permitted. Several days later I received a phone call from an aggressive man who asked Where are you? I said, Sorry, who is this? You said you were coming down to visit our Base Camp in West Virginia! OK, OK, let me see how I can travel down there. I asked for some basic directions and he said, Here, ask Mike. After talking for a few minutes I realized Mike was Mike Roselle, one of the founders of Earth First! I had not seen Mike since 1994, when we fought the Cove/Mallard clearcutting in Dixie, Idaho. The logging industry and their supporters in the local population were so galvanized against our presence that we had to travel forty miles out of our way for gasoline and sixty miles for supplies. After three summers of clandestine direct action against the clearcutting it was decided to hold an open air march snaking through the wilderness of Idaho. Employing this brilliant, simple, nonviolent method caused court entanglements and the investors went on to less controversial timber sales. Simply put, we won! Frank Smith, Ben Hickling and I headed to Climate Ground Zero Base Camp to meet these environmental resisters. With the aid of Google Maps, a borrowed GPS and an oldschool map we proceeded to get lost for ten hours. We stopped at the mother of all 7-Elevens to ask for directions, and as we opened the front door all eyes were on us. The place was filled with people going to work, logging and

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coal mining. All were dressed in military fatigues, and the room turned very quiet. In all of the civil rights and anti-war protests I have been in since 1968 I have never felt such unbridled hate. The room remained dangerously still until the young register girl gave a little impish smile, drew a long breath and said in a thick Southern accent, Now youre the one who talks funny! White-hot hate turned to side-splitting laughter, as the miners and loggers made their way to their trucks and to a dying industry. They knew intuitively those activists from the city were not to blame for their pending unemployment. After thirty-seven phone calls to Base Camp we arrived. It was not the end of the rainbow the scene looked more like Ches final days attempting to stimulate a revolution in Bolivia. The climate activists were given four ruined cottages by the locals, structures that were not worth the effort even to tear down. But looks were deceiving we were standing on the shoulders of almost a decade of resistance to mountaintop removal. It was the local retired and unemployed coal miners who invited Mike and other lowbaggers to come, not just to organize protests but to move in and see the struggle through. Perhaps by being eyewitnesses to the destruction of the mountains of West Virginia, we will be able to find the courage to stop the anonymous murder of the children of Afghanistan.

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Mike Roselle This interview was recorded on June 22, 2009 and transcribed by Nathan Kukulski. So, youve been here since February? Actually since September, early September last year. Early September? Yes. And when was your first action, was that in February? February 3 was our first action. And now its the summertime. And now its almost, well, it is summertime, yes. Got through Appalachia spring and tomorrow really is the final event of the series. We kicked it off on Memorial Day.

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You lived through the monsoon. Oh boy, we had high water and its been pretty soggy here. Youre rebuilding three cottages that have been donated, with a fourth on the way. The fourth one is, yeah, thats our big project now, to get a roof on it and have a good meeting house. And affinity groups have been coming in from all over the country to cross the line, and tomorrow were going to Tomorrow we have our high-profile delegation coming down to join a lot of the elders and locals who have been vocal in this movement, so its gonna be a very special kind of event. I mean, weve moved across the line up there and been getting arrested for five years, so in that sense its not going to be anything real unusual. But whats different is having Dr. James Hansen and Daryl Hannah and Ken Hechler and all these other people who have a lot of stature, who have been involved in the campaign for a long time, who are just really well-known voices for the work that were doing. So, that makes it special, its not about the numbers. Were real happy right now with the number of people weve seen already and we dont even know how many will be out there tomorrow. But Im feeling really good because this is a great group and you can feel stuff in this movement that I havent felt in other sorts of mobilizations. So, without an organization, without big money, and

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without Well, its an old-fashioned nonviolent campaign, and I think we maybe were forgetting how to do those. Theres always been some of it going on, but with the climate, especially, I dont really think that we were approaching it in the way that the campaigns of Gandhi or King would kind of instruct us to. There are certain hard and fast rules, and then just a whole way of looking at how youre gonna do this, but its been very different here, and its a feeling. And a lot of this campaign is just a feeling, its not real intellectual. Everyone knows why theyre here, we dont spend a lot of time talking about that. So with mountaintop removal, this is unusual for the last thirty or forty years because it is people who live here who wanted us to come in and to put a stop to this. Were not coming in here because we think this is something that should stop, but theyre watching the ruination of their town here in Beckley and close to it. Yeah, well, there always has been a resistance here, and I think theyve always reached out for any support that they could get, whether regionally or internationally even. At various times theyve received some of that support, but it really did seem to be that they werent getting a lot of real support. People would come here and get their picture taken, and go to Eds house and have coffee, and then theyd go back and theyd write a letter about mountaintop removal or show a picture. But there was not much going on here that really was gonna make a difference in peoples everyday lives, which was blasting going on every day and dust falling on their place, and just trucks and trucks

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of coal going up and down the road. So, this campaign now has reached a level where its gotten just a bit more real and people can really feel whats going on, and I cant say that about too much. Theres a certain feeling about this campaign, and everybody that comes up here, I think, gets a little dose of it. So, people arent trudging in and out of here like in other situations and other campaigns throughout the country. I mean, you and others are here to stay. Well, its kind of like those pitcher plants where the fly smells sweet and crawls in and then it climbs down in it and never gets to leave. This campaign is attracting people. Everyones noticed it. They want to be here for a couple days theyre here for a couple weeks, they want to be here for a couple weeks, they wind up staying for a couple months, and thats exactly what we need here. Were trying to stand our ground here, and that doesnt mean just protesting. I mean, we are protesting, but what were really trying to do is stop mountaintop removal and we dont want to let up until were done. So we have to continue to find ways to make the pressure thats necessary for these politicians, these spineless politicians, to stand up and do the right thing which they already know that they should be doing. Now, tomorrow were going where? Were going to Marsh Fork Elementary, and then well go to the gate to the Ed White Mines, and we will blockade the gate.

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And why to the elementary school? The elementary school is at the base of the Shumate Dam, which contains eight and a half billion gallons of toxic coal sludge. So its not a water dam. No, its a coal slurry dam, and theyre probably the most unstable and dangerous things that have ever been built in the history of this planet. Well, Mike, thanks for your time. Were going to try to get this out tonight and more tomorrow. This is Vincent Eirene for Blast Furnace Radio in Coal River, West Virginia, and theres no recession here.

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Afterword In Baghdad, the driving was almost as frightening as the fghting. It was like the bumper cars at Kennywood amusement park. People drove fast and you could tell the cars had been in several accidents. Once, as we were pulling onto a rotary, a little girl jumped on the side of the car; poor and wild-eyed, she asked for American money. One US dollar was worth a half months wages. In our taxi, through our translator, people were screaming at her, imploring her to get off the car before she hurt herself. As all this hysteria was taking place, the girl and I stared at each other. The car seemed to be moving at the same pace as a carousel, and I knew she would never let go. As I peeled off a one dollar bill she continued to stare at me and smiled. Grabbing the money, she gracefully dropped down to the street and melted into the crowd. We went around once more and she was screaming with joy, mockingly waving the treasure in the air.

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My daughters Caitlin and Chenoa were born into this world. They are strong, athletic, and vegan. They are happy and ready for this world, and everything it throws at them. They have entered it and all its risks with joy and will never let go until the prize is ripped from its hands.

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Vincent Scotti Eiren has been working for peace and justice since 1968. He was born in Brookline, Pennsylvania in 1952, and raised in Upper St. Clair, a suburb of Pittsburgh. He graduated from Ohio State University in 1975 with a degree in secondary education/social studies and has since been the guest of several American prisons due to his resistance to the nuclear arms race, Americas various wars, globalization and environmental destruction. From his early days raising funds for the reconstruction of Bach Mai Hospital, a hospital in Vietnam devastated by American bombs, to his recent trips to the mountains of West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal, Vincent has been a tireless activist. Vincent cared for the homeless out of his home in Pittsburgh for thirty-five years, founding and running the Catholic Worker shelter known as Duncan and Porter House on the North Side. He has spoken on campuses and at gatherings across the country and has traveled six times to New Orleans to do relief and justice work in the aftermath of Katrina. He is the father of two children, Caitlin and Chenoa, who oddly enough look a lot like him. His website is www.notowar.com.